Campus and in-buildingnetworks drive advancesin cable technologiesInnovations include more-convenient ways toaccess cable, and the use of microducts.

BY MATTHEW MILLER, Corning Optical Communications

Traditionally fiber-optic cable was reserved for long-haul applications, enabling voice and data transmissions to
cross continents and seas. As personal
computers and the internet gained traction as a part of daily life and business,
fiber-optic infrastructure needed to
extend deeper into networks—all the
way indoors.

This shift in fiber’s use from an exclusively long-distance, outdoor medium
to campus backbones, then indoor riser
backbones, and now the building horizontal challenged cable manufacturers to develop solutions for new environments. Over the years, the resulting
cable designs and installation technologies have addressed bandwidth demand,
distance constraints, deployment hurdles, and cost considerations.

These factors remain the same in today’s cable evolution, but the drivers
have changed.

Mobility—Businesses benefit whenemployees can collaborate and main-tain connectivity wherever they meetand work. Mobility is a key enablerfor collaboration, so it is not surpris-ing that WiFi use in the enterprise is onthe rise. Infonetics reports that 52 per-cent of today’s employees work exclu-sively over WiFi, and the figure is ex-pected to reach 65 percent by 2019. The

Internet of Things—At its core, the
Internet of Things (Io T) is a concept describing what happens when the cost
of computing and networking becomes
so small that almost any object can be
imbued with these capabilities. The
sheer number of devices able to connect to the network wirelessly is increasing at a much faster rate than wired devices. For example, Infonetics reports
in the 2017 WLAN Strategies North
America Enterprise Survey that “
respondents expect their installed base of IP
desk phones, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs to grow by more
than 30 percent by 2019. Mobile devices

Shown here is the cross-section of a typical indoor composite cable, which
includes fiber-optic and copper subunits.